Traditionally, in this Tamriel Infinium column, I have been extremely critical of The Elder Scrolls Online, and I promise you, I’m sure I’ll lob criticism at the game in the future too. But I also like to give proper praise to video game developers when they do something extremely right, and that’s the case with Homestead.

My first MMO experience with housing was probably very similar to every other old-school MMO gamer’s experience with housing: Ultima Online. But I didn’t really play UO for a very long time, only a month or so. My first real experience was in Star Wars Galaxies. Unfortunately, that game is shut down now, so I can’t show you just how powerful and creatively flexible that housing was. Since then, I’ve experienced housing in a number of different MMOs. I’ve seen EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, WildStar, and of course, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Although some of these housing systems have elements that I really like, I don’t think any of them reach the level that ESO reaches. And to help illustrate what I mean, I’ve compiled a list of four reasons that Homestead is better than those other MMO housing systems.

Instanced, but in-world

Bree and I livestreamed some of the houses and how parts of the system worked yesterday (assuming the upload goes well, you should be able to see the whole thing a bit later today on YoutTube), and the number one thing that impressed us about the overall mechanics of the homes in Homestead was the instances themselves. It wasn’t the fact that they were instanced or that they had gorgeous aesthetics like pools or rippling streams — although it’s true that they had those things. Each of these instances felt as if it were still in the world, despite actually being in its own phase.

For example, the Gardner House, which is one of my favorites, sits in the middle of Wayrest. When you step out of the house into the yard, you are literally in Wayrest, but still in your instance that you can decorate the way you wish. Of course, there is a giant wall between you and the town, but you can see all the surrounding houses, and if a member of your group is in Wayrest, you can see her on the map, as we tested on the stream. And the reverse happens, too. In Wayrest proper, you can point to the Gardner House and show people what the house looks like.

For me, it’s a level of immersion that you don’t see in other instanced houses. Although many of the houses in EverQuest II sit in cities, most are little more than a door on some building. SWTOR and WildStar have great instanced houses, but you cannot really point to a map and say, “This is where my house is.” And non-instanced houses like in UO or SWG litter the landscape, plus there was no (legal) way you could get a house in one of the major cities.

Terrain alignment

I say that terrain alignment is a feature that ESO housing has over other games, but it’s more what terrain alignment represents, which is two-fold. First, it means that novice designers don’t have to get everything perfectly right in order to make a decently designed house. Second, it can be turned off, which means that it gives freedom to those who want to just go all out with decorating.

I saw some amazing things created in SWG. Some of the designers in that game were true artists. They would mix together items that shouldn’t belong together and create absolutely unbelievable set pieces. But if you were a novice, it was daunting. That’s why many houses in that game ended up just being bags of stuff floating in the middle of the room. However, the basic idea that you can align items with the terrain makes for quick set ups, say, if you want to have company over for dinner. And items like plates and food will align with a placed table instead of the floor if you want to go that route.

Games like WildStar have systems where you can place anything practically anywhere, so the idea of placing a chair on the ceiling isn’t really a new idea, but it does demonstrate the flexibility I mean. We have already seen people build houses inside other houses, but honestly, the creative flexibility doesn’t end there with Homestead. The design tools make the possibilities endless, and I’m excited to see what other people build.

Interactive furniture

This seems like a small thing: When I have a candle on a table, I would like to be able to light it and blow it out. Simple, right? I appreciate how difficult it is to design lights that turn on or chairs that you can sit in. But it’s these seemingly simple touches take a good housing system and make it great. During the livestream yesterday, Bree gave ESO praise for taking Homestead seriously, rather than just slapping in half-baked housing in to shut housing nuts up. It’s refreshing to see a triple-A game take a housing system seriously instead of attempting to make it into a half-assed alternate achievement system.

Movable pre-set furniture

Some housing systems have preset markers or hooks for your furniture; others have specific items that appear in very specific places when you buy them from a game system. I am all for cutting down the time and skill that it takes to make a serviceable home for your character. But some games like World of Warcraft or SWTOR, like to take nearly all control away from the player. And this house that’s supposed to be a personal hideaway for the player. But if my hideaway begins to look like every other hideaway, then it’s not very personal.

ESO gives options. There is a pre-set furniture layout for every house that you can buy with Crowns, which again is great for the novice or lazy or time-constrained player. But ESO goes to the next level by adding those housing items to your collections. This means that you can pick them up are place them however you want or even add to the pre-set furniture.

All right, that’s enough from me, it’s your turn. Have you had a chance to jump into ESO to mess around with Homestead? What do you think? Does it outshine other housing systems? It’s at the top of the list of best housing systems for me; where would you rank it?

Housing rocks in this game, still the (some would say Compensated ) ESO forum hate machine is acting like it is the biggest failure of the century. I was able to buy my manor at half price because of the Crowns I received as a subscriber. I can see with a few tweaks this being the best housing in any MMO.

Honestly, don’t feel like there is compelling enough reason to get a house. While it’s better than many MMOs, I can’t help but reminisce of Ultima Online. The amount of decorative items that actually did something. Having to set up your crafting there. Bonuses. And GOD, the runebook libraries that allowed you to teleport around not to mention the extensive storage space added made having even a simple house almost a necessity.

You get some intractable items and you can put crafting stations there. But I could just log my crafter at Riften and accomplish the same thing.

That wasn’t what Larry said, though. He stated that ESO’s housing is better *right now.* He kind of swept everything else away with the wave of a hand, and I have the feeling he hasn’t been in EQ2 in many years, if ever.

He was riding the ESO hype train, and we’re all excited for ESO: Morrowind and impressed with how much Zenimax has turned ESO around since launch, trust me there. Just not to the point where we can no longer compare it accurately to other games’ housing systems, lol.

I don’t remember having to craft boxes, but I do remember that once you got off the boat from the starter island, you were granted a lovely one-room apartment, and a nice little cork board to hang on your wall. That board was your auction interface, and at launch you had to stay in your room, idle, with the board open, for any of your goods to remain on the market for sale.

Of course, they finally changed that so you could go play the game instead, but amusingly one holdover is that EQ2 has no idle or AFK logout. It couldn’t have one because of that “feature”, and still doesn’t because having AFK people in instances wasn’t a problem.

If ESO’s housing comes close to EQ2’s housing, in terms of what you can build with it… I’m sold. I still remember collecting dozens of candles to make my little Freeport hovel bright enough to not feel like a dungeon. :)

I’ll be curious to see how this measures up to FFXIV. Which has vibrant neighborhoods, IF you can get yourself a spot that is, though now we do have appartments. Can you lie down in beds, sit in the chairs? <<< About the only thing missing from EQ2. Everything else EQ2 has nailed down pat.

That said, ESO is a great game for housing and I'm sure it will be refined as time goes on.

I still can’t believe it’s better than Everquest 2’s housing. I don’t care about a door on a building. I care about the homes, the accessories, and everything I can do inside of it, outside of it and around it. There have got to be hundreds of thousands of house items (and many of those are craftable) in EQ2 already, not to mention hundreds if not over one thousand different styles and sizes of homes, guild halls, etc. There are tons of items with motion, layers of textures and opaque/see through windows and wall treatments, and running water. There are also tons of actual portals to zones, other homes and guild halls, as well as crafting tables, hundreds of unique holiday and event items and music boxes. Everyone can visit your home if you leave it open for visitors, and you can sell your craftables and loot drops from it to save other players the broker fees.

Color me skeptical. I’ll be checking out ESO’s housing tomorrow, on my day off (and I’ll be pinned down in a Nor’Easter so I’ll have plenty of time and little else to do to boot). Nice is one thing: brushing off Everquest 2’s housing as inferior to basically anyone elses’ is quite another.

Oh yeah! I just remembered that you can also get actual buffs for your characters off many various Everquest 2 house items. Also, many of EQ2’s house items are definitely interactible. Even its house pets often have huge lists of things you can have them do as you play with them, and some will even chase each other around or do things on their own as you’re working in the house.

Moreover, insofar as having a view of town goes, yes, you can look out over EQ2’s balconies (or wander their islands or outlands) and see EQ2’s towns and zones from some of them, too. So people can’t see a whole building from town– um, big deal? It’s not like they can wave to you and you to them while you’re in your home, nor can they stroll up to your door and come in.

Sorry, Larry, but I am calling you out on this one. ESO may be all right, and I love Elder Scrolls, believe me, but Everquest 2 reigns supreme in the housing department. I’m surprised its database has survived without spontaneously combusting every server after over 12 years of operation.

I got the three starter closets with alts and bought the Cyrodilic Jungle House and must say I’m quite happy with it, perfect location, and like you say you feel like you are in that area when you go outside i like the tranquil feel and sounds there.
I had the crowns so was “free” and for me it’s just a place to hang my hat, i bought it furnished and someday i might get more into housing but for now they are great for instant free travel options for all my characters.
I forgot about my SWG house until i read “stuff floating in the middle of the room” and it made me laugh as that was my place in a nutshell. lol It was such a mess and something i always said i’ll go make it cool one day, but kept on dumping rewards/trophies there.
I’m not huge on decorating houses but huge on mmo’s having them, makes them feel more complete, more like a world.

Sorry Larry but EQ2 housing is so much better than what you get in ESO. ESO’s is just a gold sink for veteran players with to much gold and nothing to spend it on.Or of course you can buy one in the crown store. The Inn room that’s the free for everyone is laughable. You can maybe fit a table and a couple of chairs in it if your lucky. The free ones you get in EQ2 feels like a real house some of them have a second floor.

And there are plenty of EQ2 homes with balconies overlooking their environs…with simple placement of a teleport pad on the ground thereof, you’ve got your own personal instance of Qeynos or Maj’dul or Neriak to populate and decorate as you like!

I’d like a reason/incentive for having a house(s). e.g. in BDO you get buffs with having certain furniture or decorations placed. Otherwise, given my precious limited amount of gaming time each day I probably won’t devote much of it to “decorating”. I probably will use crowns to setup crafting, banking as such since I have crowns being subbed.

I really like what I see about ESO Housing, I’ve been thinking of playing the game just to check it out.

All of the stuff you hit on is what made me love Black Desert housing, as the best MMO housing ever. Everything is literally in-world, but instanced… but on top of that, no loading screens. You can literally walk into your house instantly, or into anyone elses copy of it – instantly. No loading. It’s amazing.

Add to that every house in BDO is 100% unique… the city has rooms and apartments, the countryside has cottages and farms. There are hilltop manors, desert villas and more. It’s truly amazing.

And I love that the decor is rooted in “real” items that represent (besides the cash shop ;) The far away lands you travel to. And the rarity of such things in certain parts of the world. A hand-crafted Valencian cabinet might be a rare sight in a home in Calpehon!

I’m not super thrilled with ESO’s housing, though I guess it’s because I’m used to *much* bigger sprawling huge areas with many buildings, secrets, lairs, etc that you buy for 1 10th the price of ESO’s “biggest” houses in Pirate 101. There are huge amounts of interactive items you can place anywhere in that game too but the big houses there are just sooooo much bigger and better designed than ESO’s houses with so many extra touches and cost $10-$13 instead of $110-$120.

Also it would have been nice to have been able to get a big plot of empty land that we could set up a bunch of stuff how we wanted on it with no buildings already there to get in the way. For some reason I thought that was going to be it when I heard something about our private homesteads in personal rifts.

I’ve been spoiled on much better housing in Pirate 101 for as I mentioned 1 10th the price. How can I be excited about ESO’s overblown and small feeling (yes even the biggest feel small to me after being used to Pirate 101 housing) houses for such crazy amounts of money? Maybe if I hadn’t played Pirate 101 and experienced what some companies will give you for much less I would be more happy with ESO’s housing.

And while the feeling of being there in the landscape is good, the feeling of it being your house is quickly quashed when there are 20 people standing around all saying “That’s my house there.” It doesn’t feel like it’s your piece of the landscape to me.

Is ESO’s housing better than nothing? Yeah. Is it all it could be? Not by far. Not to sound like a broken record but check out Pirate 101’s housing system and then justify the prices of the houses in ESO to me. Maybe you’re better off not doing that as it’s hard to be as excited about ESO’s housing once you’ve seen a system that gives you so much more for so much less.

I’ve checked out a few of the houses in ESO, but nothing’s grabbed me as yet. While I never got to housing in P101, I did have a house in Wizard 101 and if Pirates is done in a similar fashion, I’d have to agree that that housing is excellent.

I would never be able to afford a house in ESO if I had to pay gold for it. The prices are pretty astronomical.

My perception of them is they all do pretty much the same as all the others from EQ2 right up to ESO, with Wildstar being just a little different as you can get some use out of the housing plots with gathering nodes and so on. EQ2 might have a slight advantage due to being around for so long so I feel it has more furniture items to decorate your abode of choice.

Other than that is comes down to liking the styling of the houses provided and that is why I go for EQ2 / Rift over the others. Personally would put ESO at the bottom of the pile in that regard though Swtor is pretty close.

ESO has a leg up on BDO housing in terms of potential housing locations. For example your “house” sometimes is actually a large fenced off area with a front/back yard areas so you get the outside and inside. BDO by comparison has a home or two with balconies but most of them feel like apartments rather than actual houses and property you own.

BDO has a colossal leg up in the cost department where you can unlock various housing for contribution earned through in game means with ease where ESO really sticks it to you hard for housing costs. For example the “Gardner Estate” Larry likes is roughly similar to the Heidel 6-3 “Large House” for a mere 4 contribution vs a million gold (or around $40) in ESO.

BDO I feel has a leg up in the decorating department if you take unique features like being able to reskin your walls/floors into account. For example I loved Serenity Falls Estate but the Khajit building with wooden plank walls was a big no go for me. Placing items in BDO is simple and linear, and while you do get more freedom in ESO this can also be incredibly frustrating if you want to do something interesting. Dragging along the surface is still very wonky at times and since you have no bird’s eye view in ESO you can’t see how it will actually look meaning you have to place items multiple times trying to get things to look right from other angles.

BDO also has a colossal leg up in the functionality department. In addition to the furniture being actually useful (beds for energy, house items for buffs, etc) the crafting stations are pretty much required in BDO to do Cooking or Alchemy which pushes people to housing. ESO by comparison houses basically function as a free recall to the town you have your house in. So I guess if you really want to be Scrooge McDuck and teleport to your home town for free then zone out then use wayshrine to zone wherever but otherwise the houses are pointless. The crafting stations are in direct conflict of usefulness as wayshrine as crafting station in middle of no where is great but terrible if your house is in/near a town since you can just walk outside.

Like most things with Zenimax these are likely early issues to push out the system and collect money. After a while they will make the system somewhat decent and not so bad.

It’s kinda limited?
It looks good enough for an MMO engine (which is not so great compared to Skyrim), it’s fairly easy to use… but it’s not very useful.
There’s very little point outside of decorating a little house, and it suffers from the same problems as the rest of the game: it’s expensive for the most basic things to batshit crazy expensive for some others, and most materials are just super annoying to get with the inane loot tables.

So many things can drop from such a large pool of objects/chests/NPCs that it gets a bit ridiculous. To be honest, that’s consistant with The Elder Scrolls since Oblivion, with so much random junk that almost nothing feels rewarding. But when you need several or dozens of items that are only a relatively small percentage drop? It goes from boring booty to grating grind. Sure, people will find the best way to abuse the loot system (apparently, that has already started…), but man that does not make me want to even start.

It’s a serviceable housing system for a modern MMO, but we’re so, so far from the sandbox elements of yesteryear (and now part of genres that dropped the MMO part).

They went out of their way to make decorating your house the most unrewarding, inconvenient task possible. Instead of picking up a bunch of corns and dropping them in a basket, you have to farm a ton of materials and craft fake corns. Instead of brewing a potion and putting a bottle on the shelf, you have to farm a ton of materials and craft a fake potion bottle. Come on. Just let me pick up an item in the world and put it in my house.

No, of course not, because that would count as storage and it would actually be convenient for players, wouldn’t it.

In Everquest 2 you can just pick up your potion bottle, or any one of hundreds of thousands of other items, and place them wherever you want. You can also sell your craftables and loot drops from your house, back up your house template, take it all with you when you move from home to home, and invite anyone else you want to come and craft, get buffs or socialize there with you. If you haven’t tried EQ2, it’s F2P and you really won’t feel compelled to buy anything until the end game, especially if you’re a raider. But if you’re still there by level 90+, it’s not a big deal to help keep the lights on.

Even to just put bag of rice in your house, here are the materials for one single sack –
1 Sack of Rice –
5 Decorative Wax (rare, farming needed)
4 Bast ( rare material see above)
5 Nickel
6 Rice
20 Flour (why do you need more flour than rice in a bag of rice???)

Now imagine crafting all of the many items needed to furnish an entire house, the thousands of rare materials you will need and the amount of farming required.

Its nice they went into such detail of individual items, like cups, bowls and candles, but they ruined it by overdoing the amount of materials required for a single item and it makes it hard to collect recipes when there are thousands.

If the game had an auction house it might not be so bad, but shopping all the guild stores (that don’t even have a search by name feature) for materials across the game world adds even more work. I know they are making as it hard as possible to make you use the cash shop, but I think they went a little too far and its going to limit the creativity. It shouldnt take hours to make one sack of rice.

Hang on to your mats.
I think being patient will pay off here, for now i just hoard mats and recipes.
First iterations and all that.
I expect changes and adjustments after the initial “crown store frenzy” has died down.
Keeping mat requirements high early on will bring the big wallets into the shop.
Not very subtle, but it’ll work. It always does.

Oh yeah, ESO’s auction house is terribad too, making buying other players’ crafted goods virtually impossible. Good point! Thank heavens for Everquest 2’s broker…. Not to mention that you can place hundreds of items in most of the homes, as well as actually store whatever items you want in six vault bags for extra long-term storage when you run low on bank space.

I’m not going to say anymore, as poor Larry is probably hiding under his computer desk by this point….

This this a 1000 times this. I really love all the features the article mentioned, and overall am really enjoying myself, but I’ve been dismayed to see how onerous it is, how many rare ingredients are required, to do something simple like a slab of cook meat to put on a table to make it look like dinner is ready.

They really really need to tone it down so humble/simple items are also simple to make by low level crafters. Sure, lavish furniture and decorations should be like this, but, come on, give us non-maxed out non-champions a break!

It went Live 2 days ago, so I think people need to keep things in perspective. Yes, you will have to search for blueprints and mats. It’s a totally new system. In a couple of weeks, there will be a glut of cheap blueprints available, as well as mats, offered in chat spam and on traders.

So breathe.

For myself, I do a couple rounds of a city on my main and an alt, popping open containers and seeing what’s inside. 20 mins a day, for yesterday and today, and I’ve already amassed a decent stash of varying rarities. I’m not even doing the writs yet.

IMHO, the drop rate is fine. You’re not supposed to have all the blueprints a day after release.

Yeah, some people do that, but more often than not to reset chests. I don’t participate. I have a route that I take around a couple of the cities, and I always have a full bag of goodies at the end of it. Motifs, items to sell via fencing, crafting mats, etc. I also rake in a couple thousand in gold, so on that note alone it’s worth it as an exercise while I am working on my first two morning coffees.

I’m enjoying housing so far, but with a couple problems, which may be rather serious:

a) I could barely afford a medium house, but it’s very stylish and spacious. But I can only place 4 collectibles in it?! I placed a horse, 2 pets, and my smuggler, and that’s it?! That’s devastatingly small.

b) I have completed many of the achievements to purchase the reward items to place in my house…but I can’t afford them! 10-15k for each item it outrageously expensive.

I don’t know whether these two problems will make me ragequit yet, but they just might.

Normally when I see over priced things in a cash shop, its a huge turn off. Usually because its part of a half arsed game, and you can tell the devs primary focus is cash shop first, game second.

With ESO, I feel quite the opposite though, and its kinda troublesome. I love the game. And have spent more money in cash shop items than any other mmo (which is still under 100 dollars). But I do so with the notion of “I love this game, and want to support the devs making it.” I want to see MORE ESO. The announcement of the Morrowind expansion was mind blowing, and confirms that this company fully wants to support and expand this game.

So dropping 50 bucks for a virtual “home”? Seems pretty silly, unless you look at it from the perspective of, “dropping 50 bucks to support a game you really enjoy playing.”

I want ESO to stay alive and get even better. I figure thats not gonna happen if they arent making money off of it.

BDO has more or less all of the features that Larry listed (with slightly varying implementations), for those who are interested in other games with similar housing. The housing is instanced in-world (no loading screens!), some of the furniture is interactive, and there are “preset” decoration options for some aspects. It doesn’t sound like BDO’s furniture is as freely alignable as ESO’s, though.

While I think ESO’s housing has more overall customization, BDO’s housing is much much much easier to jump into and start working with. BDO’s housing is like elementary school compared to ESO’s doctorate degree, which requires an exponential more amount of work to enjoy (if you aren’t buying it on the cash shop).

I like the systems in place, but the implementation seems too push people toward the cash shop in excesses. The materials and blueprints are hard to find (or one click in the shop), some of the coolest houses cost $ only.

Non of the houses spoke to me enough that I would buy them with in game currency let alone real monies.

After watching the stream Bree & Larry did I patched the game up on my desktop (took some pain killers) and spent an hour looking around them but still couldn’t find one I liked. If you like the styling then it seems to be pretty decent mmo housing but for me there wasn’t anything so nothing to be excited about :-(

(and sorry Larry in my case Rift and EQ2 still hold the mantle of best housing)

I actually like how they decided to go with crafting interdependence. It means you cannot have everything right here, right now, but instead has you work towards a goal. I also like how certain items that are expensive, but sitting in banks ‘just because’, are now used for an additional feature.

And why do we all want the blueprints so fast? I looted a handfull yesterday and only had like 90mins to play. If I were able to find them all within just a few weeks time I’d have the ‘been there, done that’ feeling kicking in within 30 days. Why would I want that? I want to enjoy this feature for many months and years to come and I hope ZOS will stick with it’s current implementation.

Please ZOS, do not give in to the ‘I want it all, I want it now’ crowd!

I just want to be able to craft some basic furniture without having to farm materials for a month to do it. Make the fancy stuff take rarer materials. But a freaking basic box shouldn’t take hours to gather material for.

Yeah, I’m fine with blueprints being rare and feeling special when you find one, even for humble stuff. But, the making of the humble stuff has to be much easier. Let beginner crafters make it and you’ll get them hooked!

I’m cautiously optimistic the flurry of people saying exactly this will lead them to dial it back a bit in the near future.

It needs work. SWG housing will always be my first love with wildstar being second due to how you can create more with the tools given and eso has that in a way. For me just a few things in there that still needs to be made better like higher caps, more interactions with the home and a few more that would make it in my list of favorite systems.

While I like the houses that they have, I’m not to sold on the furniture crafting as of yet.
The drop rates for blueprints seem a bit low, and the drop rates for the crafting materials seems very low.

This appears to be a patch FOR very dedicated crafters but it may also turn away casual crafters or force them to the cash shop which is probably more apt.

I think I would have rather they done something similar to furniture crafting that they have done with the other crafts. Materials and blueprints are easier to get but it takes real life time to make them, two days to craft a bench or four days to craft a bed and you can only be workign on so many at a time.

Plus, if they let beginner crafters make the simple stuff, it’ll let them churn those out and have a viable place in the market to sell some things. More advanced crafters can then focus materials and time on the truly rare/unique/cool items, and every crafter becomes engaged in making things for homesteads.

MASSIVELY OVERHEARD

“Pretty much every gankbox promises it will not be a gankbox right up until it launches as a gankbox because that is how gankboxes convince people who do not want to play gankboxes to buy a gankbox. Still waiting for one to disprove that rule, but until it actually happens, it’s a good bet against.”